Deep winds beneath Saturn's upper clouds from a seasonal long-lived planetary-scale storm

The original publication is available at www.nature.com/nature.International audienceConvective storms occur regularly in Saturn's atmosphere. Huge storms known as Great White Spots, which are ten times larger than the regular storms, are rarer and occur about once per Saturnian year (29.5 Earth years). Current models propose that the outbreak of a Great White Spot is due to moist convection induced by water. However, the generation of the global disturbance and its effect on Saturn's permanent winds have hitherto been unconstrained by data, because there was insufficient spatial resolution and temporal sampling to infer the dynamics of Saturn's weather layer (the layer in the troposphere where the cloud forms). Theoretically, it has been suggested that this phenomenon is seasonally controlled. Here we report observations of a storm at northern latitudes in the peak of a weak westward jet during the beginning of northern springtime, in accord with the seasonal cycle but earlier than expected. The storm head moved faster than the jet, was active during the two-month observation period, and triggered a planetary-scale disturbance that circled Saturn but did not significantly alter the ambient zonal winds. Numerical simulations of the phenomenon show that, as on Jupiter, Saturn's winds extend without decay deep down into the weather layer, at least to the water-cloud base at pressures of 10-12bar, which is much deeper than solar radiation penetrates

The HST/ACS Coma Cluster Survey. II. Data Description and Source Catalogs

The Coma cluster was the target of a HST-ACS Treasury program designed for deep imaging in the F475W and F814W passbands. Although our survey was interrupted by the ACS instrument failure in 2007, the partially completed survey still covers ~50% of the core high-density region in Coma. Observations were performed for 25 fields that extend over a wide range of cluster-centric radii (~1.75 Mpc) with a total coverage area of 274 arcmin^2. The majority of the fields are located near the core region of Coma (19/25 pointings) with six additional fields in the south-west region of the cluster. In this paper we present reprocessed images and SExtractor source catalogs for our survey fields, including a detailed description of the methodology used for object detection and photometry, the subtraction of bright galaxies to measure faint underlying objects, and the use of simulations to assess the photometric accuracy and completeness of our catalogs. We also use simulations to perform aperture corrections for the SExtractor Kron magnitudes based only on the measured source flux and half-light radius. We have performed photometry for ~73,000 unique objects; one-half of our detections are brighter than the 10-sigma point-source detection limit at F814W=25.8 mag (AB). The slight majority of objects (60%) are unresolved or only marginally resolved by ACS. We estimate that Coma members are 5-10% of all source detections, which consist of a large population of unresolved objects (primarily GCs but also UCDs) and a wide variety of extended galaxies from a cD galaxy to dwarf LSB galaxies. The red sequence of Coma member galaxies has a constant slope and dispersion across 9 magnitudes (-21<M_F814W<-13). The initial data release for the HST-ACS Coma Treasury program was made available to the public in 2008 August. The images and catalogs described in this study relate to our second data release

A recent increase in global wave power as a consequence of oceanic warming

Wind-generated ocean waves drive important coastal processes that determine flooding and erosion. Ocean warming has been one factor affecting waves globally. Most studies have focused on studying parameters such as wave heights, but a systematic, global and long-term signal of climate change in global wave behavior remains undetermined. Here we show that the global wave power, which is the transport of the energy transferred from the wind into sea-surface motion, has increased globally (0.4% per year) and by ocean basins since 1948. We also find long-term correlations and statistical dependency with sea surface temperatures, globally and by ocean sub-basins, particularly between the tropical Atlantic temperatures and the wave power in high south latitudes, the most energetic region globally. Results indicate the upper-ocean warming, a consequence of anthropogenic global warming, is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger. This identifies wave power as a potentially valuable climate change indicator.Funding for this project was partly provided by RISKOADAPT (BIA2017-89401-R) Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the ECLISEA project part of the Horizon 2020 ERANET ERA4CS (European Research Area for Climate Services) 2016 Call

High mobility group A1 expression correlates with the histological grade of human glial tumors

Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive tumors in mankind with 50% of patients dying within the 1st year of diagnosis, and being refractory to conventional therapies. The aim of our work has been to analyse the expression of the HMGA1 proteins in human astrocytomas and glioblastomas in order to verify whether the detection of these proteins might be of some help in the diagnosis of these neoplasias. Here we report the analysis of 27 cases, including 12 astrocytomas and 15 glioblastomas, for HMGA1 expression. All the neoplastic samples showed positive staining even though the number of positive cells and the staining intensity was higher in glioblastomas compared to astrocytomas. Conversely, HMGA1 proteins were not detected in normal brain. Accordingly, expression of the hmga1 gene, analysed by RT-PCR, was higher in glioblastomas than in astrocytomas